State, corporate and chiefly power is being contested from below in South Africa

What is the transformative potential that
emerges from these struggles around land?

Dried-up land/South Africa, January 2018. Flickr/Michael Mayer. Some rights reserved.This is one of the closing articles in the current series on
‘confronting authoritarian populism and the rural world’, linked to the
Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI). The article opening the series can be read here.

Just a month ago, Jacob Zuma was president
of South Africa. An authoritarian patriarch implicated in large-scale
corruption, he had for years effectively rallied political support by invoking
populist discourses around land reform and radical economic transformation.

Zuma’s shallow radical rhetoric sat astride
disdain for the interests of ordinary rural dwellers, consistent defence of
corporate and private property rights, and the perpetuation of the longstanding
division between wealthy commercial farming areas and communal areas under forms
of state-sanctioned traditional authority.

Now Zuma is gone, but has an era of
authoritarian populism given way to a much-sought freedom? Is a new
emancipatory politics afoot?

These were the questions animating a lively
debate among activists and researchers from across the Southern African region
who met recently to prepare for a global convening of the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative. ERPI
is a global network of activist-scholars committed to understanding and
generating alternatives to such regressive and authoritarian politics.

But the heart of the challenge for rural
people in the region remains undemocratic and authoritarian forms of
governance, and this is where current activism and research is focusing.

Rural
despots and mining capital: a perfect storm

In rural South Africa, the space of
populism is dominated by traditional leaders who, under Zuma’s rule, became
more powerful and authoritarian. This was underpinned by efforts to shore up
traditional leaders – kings, chiefs and headmen – in a bid to secure rural
electoral support.

In the name of ‘custom’, rural leaders have
usurped the land rights of communities, entering into corrupt business deals.
Most such deals centre on the ‘platinum belt’ in the north-west of South
Africa, where an estimated 90 percent of the world’s platinum reserves sit
under communal land, and where poor black people continue to have insecure
rights. It’s a perfect storm. The stakes are high. Hundreds of billions of
South African Rands in mining royalties have disappeared into chiefs’ accounts,
never to be seen by the rural people who have been displaced to make way for
mining operations. Rural conflicts centre on the
explosive contradiction between local people’s land rights and livelihoods, on
the one hand, and the interests of transnationalised mining companies on the
other.

Rural conflicts centre on the explosive
contradiction between local people’s land rights and livelihoods, on the one
hand, and the interests of transnationalised mining companies on the other. All
this has set up toxic and often intractable conflicts between government,
companies and traditional leaders against rural people.

Constance Mogale of the Alliance for Rural Democracy (ARD) – a social movement linking people living in
areas held under customary tenure – explains: ‘There has been a betrayal of the
promise of democratic governance and land rights for the people. Instead of
free, prior and informed consent, [investing] companies are consulting
individual men, often self-appointed, rather than engaging customary
land-rights holders.’

Most recently, a furore has exploded across
the country, in which Zulu king Goodwill Zwelethini has threatened civil war if
his control of 2.8 million hectares were to be threatened. This was in response
to calls to rein him in, after evidence emerged that he has, through his
Ingonyama Trust which owns this once-communal land, started to convert rural
dwellers’ rights into leasehold, making people pay rent to remain on their own
land.

He has issued a call to all Zulus to
contribute to a legal fund with which to challenge any attempt to hold him to
account. As with other forms of authoritarian populism, we can see here all the
typical hallmarks: resource capture, elite interests, and a discourse that
‘enlists the poor merely as a battering ram’ in battles among elites, as Ben Cousins of the
University of the Western Cape says.

Participatory
democracy

Instead of rejecting custom, movements like
ARD are mobilising an emancipatory politics to contest the character of custom
and to democratise it. Rather than abandoning customary tenure and practices,
the challenge for rural movements is to seize on their emancipatory potential –
a point made by Mahmood Mamdani in his key work, Citizen and Subject. Despite attempts by both the apartheid and
democratic governments over decades to impose authoritarian forms of custom,
ordinary rural people intuitively grasp notions of participatory democracy. Ordinary rural people intuitively grasp notions of
participatory democracy.

Custom can be a basis for emancipatory
visions. The Nguni saying that summarises traditional social relations is ‘Umuntu ngumuntungabantu’ which means ‘a person
is a person through other people’. Instead of posing custom and human
rights in opposition to one another, a reclaiming and democratization of custom
can be a powerful step in building emancipatory politics from below.

Such a politics is emerging in some places.
In a paper for the
ERPI conference, Zenande Booi, Mazibuko Jara and Vukile Macingwana of the
rural movement Ntinga Ntaba kaNdoda, show how rural people have been fighting
against imposed and despotic traditional leaders, who claim that community land
is their own.

And in the case of the Premier of the Eastern Cape and Others v Ntamo and Others, the
community of Cala Reserve in the Eastern Cape rejected a state-imposed
headman (a local chief) and insisted that its ‘custom’ has been to elect its
own headman, a practice that it could demonstrate stretched back to the 1880s. In
other words, the community’s own definition of custom, which was democratic,
should take precedence over a state-imposed version. The community won the case
and the right to this democratic practice, unravelling a core form of
authoritarian rule in rural areas, in which chiefs have been accountable
upwards to the state rather than downwards to citizens.

Black
lives, white farms

In the commercial farmlands, in contrast,
among labour tenants and farm dwellers, there is little collective resistance
or challenge to the hegemony of white landowners. Rather, what is evident is
everyday resistance in a context of very violent structural and relational
power. What is evident is everyday resistance in a
context of very violent structural and relational power.

This is evident on the country’s eastern
seaboard, where a historical practice of ‘labour tenancy’ saw large numbers of
black tenant farmers retaining access to land by providing labour to white
farmers. In another paper
for the ERPI conference, Stha Yeni and Donna Hornby show how this
population of rural dwellers identifies as ‘farmers’ but are unable to benefit
from small-scale farmer support, as they are living on privately-owned land.
They reject the imposition of private property rights around them, saying ‘We
were here and the farms found us here. The boundaries were superimposed on us.’

An enduring tension has emerged between
people whose claims to land are based on holding title deeds versus those whose
claims are based on a history of occupation and use and the provision of free
labour over generations. And of course, being South Africa, the owners are
white and the tenant farmers are black.

Threatened by the rise of populist
sentiment, the ruling party has taken to blaming the Constitution for its own
political failures. This has sparked, not surprisingly, triumphalism among EFF
supporters and racist hysteria by the white right, with global headlines
warning of ‘another
Zimbabwe’ and banks scurrying to work out how they will deal with their
exposure of an estimated R160 billion in farmland debt.

What
might an emancipatory politics look like?

Where does this leave South Africa, reeling
as it is in the aftermath of Jacob Zuma’s traditionalist kleptocracy, economic
recession and rising populism?

We have a constrained new President, Cyril
Ramaphosa, who has been handed a mandate to expropriate land without
compensation while simultaneously confronting the corrupt chieftaincy and its
land dealings that have sold out their own people. As Richard
Poplak, recently observed:

On the land question, the president will require a
measure of aggression against the old forces of capital, who are already waving
around hundreds of billions-worth of farmer bonds like a loaded gun, to say
nothing of industrial-strength crooks like the Zulu King Zwelithini, who is
dog-whistling all manner of threats should “his” land be transferred over to
the people who live on it.

Most current agrarian struggles are
reactionary and protective, pitted against the incursions of commodification
and commercialization, rather than visionary of an alternative set of rights
and practices. But what is the transformative potential that emerges from these
struggles? What are the alternative visions?

These are the questions that rural people,
their social movements and allies in non-governmental organisations and
academia are grappling with. Should there be subdivision of big landed estates?
What about farm workers and their jobs? What will happen to production? And how
can food security and food sovereignty be achieved?

Humility
and the future

As Dinga Sikwebu of
the Tshisamani School of Activism argues, emancipatory politics means building the
momentum, and sometimes the anger, that is needed to create alternatives and
imagine a different future. Our visions for the future need to be pre-figured; even
in the midst of change, we need to start to create alternative futures. ‘A person is a person through other people.’

Because building a new politics and a new
society means uncertainty, we need to embrace humility central to a radical
politics, meaning that we don’t always know the answers and must mistrust dogma
and instruction from above.

Emancipatory politics in rural South Africa
is under-developed and rural struggles are largely defensive. But out of the
old, there are embryonic forms of agrarian alternatives and emancipatory
politics – of land redistribution, food sovereignty, participatory democracy
and accountable rural governance – that are taking root.

About the author

Ruth Hall is a professor at the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. Email: rhall@uwc.ac.za

The Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative(ERPI) was launched during 2017 as a response to the rise of authoritarian populismin
different parts of the world. Our focus is on the rural origins and
consequences of authoritarian populism, as well as the forms of
resistance and variety of alternatives that are emerging.

In March 2018, a major ERPI event will
be held in The Hague, the Netherlands, bringing together around 300
researchers and activists from across five continents. ERPI small grant
holders will present research insights and debates will focus on
mobilizing alternatives, generating new research-activist networks
across the world.

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